Several scholars, including Detienne, Bergren, and, most recently,
Pucci, have explored the interrelations between sex, drugs, and poetry
in early Greek thought and in the Odyssey in particular.1 Body- and
mind-altering substances, sexual seduction, and the magical charm of
song are linked in Homer by the notion of thelxis, enchantment. The
power to numb the mind, to cause forgetfulness of self, is, of course,
profoundly ambiguous, both pleasurable and dangerous. For every
healing drug, there is a lethal one; the delights of sex may be lifeaffirming, or they may entail disastrous consequences; and the Sirens'
version of the Iliad offers not kleos, but death.

In his essay, "Valeurs religieuses et mythiques de la terre et du
sacrifice dans 1'Odyssée," Vidal-Naquet has shown how each of the
episodes in Odysseus' wanderings offers an imaginative model in
which aspects of agriculture and sacrifice are combined and recombined in order to explore the super-human and the sub-human,
civilization and savagery, so as finally to arrive at a definition of the
properly human.2 In the Odyssey, Homer adopts a similar strategy in
his exploration of thelxis,3 providing us with constructs in which its
different facets are playfully combined, equated, and opposed, in order
to define what the French would call le bon usage du plaisir.

The girdle of Aphrodite in the Iliad already presents the intimate
link between sex and seductive speech:

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